The last couple of months have been filled to the brim with salted pork belly, and I've got so many pictures I'm starting to lose track. So here we go, a bacon super post, featuring an explosion, a take down, pounds and pounds of 'trying out', road trip bacon and the ultimate bean pot slice. Feel the warmth? That's the extra layer of fat settling in. I love being well-marbled!
Bacon Explosion
The Bacon Explosion, besides having the coolest name since Hulk Hogan, was the foodie star of Super Bowl Sunday this year. Everybody's got their Super Bowl standards, but in the last few years every fat guy in America has gotten barbecue books for xmas. Which makes Super Bowl Sunday a kind of second-Thanksgiving, an excuse to cook extravagant meals and have enough people over to polish them off.
This year the Bacon Explosion was everywhere, the Dude With A Goatee must-have. Two guys from Kansas came up with the idea, and in short order it made appearances on television shows and websites all over the world. They even put it in the New York Times, a version of culinary slumming that paper rarely resorts to.
I thought it was a fun idea, but I read it for what it was: hype. These guys have a competition barbecue team and a buddy who does internet marketing for a living. Creating the most over the top bacon item and getting their picture in the paper looks good for all of them. Plus, it's regular 'ol package bacon rolled up with sausage. It just seemed so...predictable. I've never heard a song by 'lil Wayne and Justin Timberlake, but I bet I know what it would sound like.
But amongst my friends, I'm known as The Bacon Guy, Mr. Porkalicious. I get tchotchkys of all kinds, all with pigs on them. People buy me bacon flavored chocolate and gum and toothpicks and soda and potato chips. And people sent me the bacon explosion recipe, videos about it, photos of it, articles, interviews. I was inundated with bacon explosion until I accepted the inevitable and planned a dinner party.
Ingredients
2 lbs of bacon
2 lbs of sausage
Barbecue Rub
Barbecue Sauce
1 bunch scallions, chopped
10 cloves garlic, chopped
Worcestershire sauce
The official recipe doesn't call for Worcestershire, scallions or garlic, but mine does. I used 2 lbs of Thick Cut Boars Head bacon, with 1 lb of sweet Italian sausage and 1 lb of spicy Italian, both from a local butcher. I didn't have a pre-mix barbecue rub around, so I made up a quick mix of salt, pepper, dried chilies, brown sugar and dried parsley. For sauce, I used a jar of spicy sauce from Zabar's that had been sitting unopened on the shelf for months.
The first step was actually a lot of fun. It was early enough in the day that no one was there yet, so I've got music and an apron on, and the next thing I know I'm weaving a bacon lattice and singing along. The sun was shining. Talk about truly happy.
Before I get all wrapped up in the memories, put 1 lb of bacon on the stove and start crisping it up. Pay enough attention to it to make sure it doesn't burn, but you're going to chop it once it's done, so it doesn't need to look nice.
Somehow I didn't get a picture of my bacon weave, probably a little too caught up in the moment. But it's easy- lay six strips of bacon next to each other. Take the other six in the package and weave them into the first six in a tight lattice, like the crust of a pie, but with no space between the slices.
When your weave is done, sprinkle a nice layer of BBQ seasoning over it. And go stir the bacon that's on the stove. Make sure to eat a little piece, because you can't help it anyway, so why try?
I took my sausages out of their skins and mixed them in a bowl first, so my spicy and sweet were evenly distributed. Put the sausage ball in the middle of the bacon weave and spread it to all edges, making sure your sausage ends up in one layer, about an inch thick, across the bacon spread. By now your stove bacon should be done, remove it from the pan and rough chop it into bite-sized pieces. Eat a few more.
Spread your cooked bacon on the sausage, creating a third layer. Add your chopped scallions and garlic as the next layer, sprinkle some Worcestershire over the whole thing and then a layer of BBQ sauce.
Okay, I admit, at this point I was nearly giddy. I still wasn't sure that the flavor was going to be anything new, but the nuts and bolts of constructing this thing was so much fun I didn't care.
The next step was easier than I expected. For some reason I thought it was going to be hard to separate the first bacon layer from the sausage layer. There's enough pig fat between to the two to lube an engine. Separating them was not an issue.
What you're doing is kind of back-rolling the sausage layer into a spiral shape like a jelly roll. It's a great idea, and part of what makes this such a brilliant recipe. Rather than being 2 inches of pork fat and nitrates with a little, saucy center, the crunch of the fried bacon and the freshness of the onions and garlic are spread throughout the roll, making their stand in every bite. This is what keeps it from being a bacon-wrapped sausage ball, or something Burger King would come up with. This is what kept it from being predictable.Once you've back-rolled the sausage, seal the ends and any holes that have appeared in the roll. Now roll it forward in the bacon blanket, surrounding the sausage on all sides with the weave. Once it's rolled, sprinkle another layer of BBQ rub on all sides.
It's actually really easy. This is one of those recipes that takes as much time to photograph and write up as it does to make. It just looks so pretty you'd think it was complicated.The originators of the recipe are BBQ guys, their recipe calls for smoking the explosion over a constant stream of hickory smoke. Sounds great, but ready access to a smoker is one of the sacrifices I make to live in Manhattan. I have a smoker in Jersey City, but I couldn't get to it that day. On balance, it's worth it.
So mine was going in the oven. Because the smoker fellas refuse to accept that anyone would cook their baby in a kitchen, there isn't really a settled method for roasting it. I decided to use their smoking time and temperature, 225° for 1 hour/inch, or about 2 1/2 hours. Looking later, I realized this was the Times' suggestion as well.
I couldn't smoke the explosion, but the Worcestershire added a touch of the smoke flavor. I also used a method that I got from a recipe for ribs in Cook's Illustrated, placing a pan with Lapsang Souchong tea leaves in the oven. The tea has this weird, smoky flavor. I can't drink it, but it's better for adding smoke flavor to an oven dish than any other method I know of.
Ten minutes under the broiler finished it off and gave it a little crisp at the end. They recommend another coating of BBQ sauce to finish, but it looked so good I didn't want to mess with it. It was obviously juicy and I wasn't convinced that another layer of sauce had anything to offer.
That's it, slice and serve.Jesus it was good. Bacon in the oven for 2 1/2 hours would render out it's fat and be a dried, crusty mess. 2 lbs of sausage, however, 2 lbs of sausage has got the stomach to handle that kind of oven time. What you get is bacon that renders out and starts to take on sausage grease. Bacon, re-hydrated and roasted with sausage grease. The sauce and rub give it kick and a different kind of moistness that is nice, if mostly for variety, but the melding of the sausage and bacon flavors was something I had never tasted.
I definitely recommend the onions and garlic, they added a lot to the texture, to the way the whole thing tasted and felt in the mouth. The sausage and bacon are all solidly structured after that kind of exposure to heat, but there's so much fat involved that they have a pretty uniform consistency. The scallions and garlic still had a freshness to them and a little bit of pop.
The explosion went over really well. I freakin' loved it and had to threaten a fork in the hand to a couple people so I could save a slice for a friend that had to work that night. There were, oddly enough, a handful of extremely healthy eaters that showed up that night, lovely girls with fresh skin and bouncy hair who wear clothes that you could conceivably work out in, all the time. Even they liked it.
I started out thinking this recipe was just kind of cheesy. Something dumb with an overblown name so they could get on Guy's Big Bite or whatever. But, like Malcolm Gladwell books and Beyoncé songs, some pop culture is so finely crafted it seems like you've never not known about the rule of 10,000 hours or the words to Bugaboo. Of course I like the Bacon Explosion, it's a classic, my grandpa used to make it when I was a kid. Didn't he?
PS - a bird really did lay eggs on my windowsill.
Crazy.
